Word: reided
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...fillers, Botox shots, breast implants and other elective cosmetic medical procedures as part of President Obama's health care reform package is raising disapproving eyebrows among some groups. A coalition of plastic surgeons, a women's group, medical associations and pharmaceutical makers were distraught when Senate majority leader Harry Reid slipped the so-called Botax levy into the health care bill late last month in hopes of raising $5.8 billion over the next 10 years. The tax would apply to elective but not reconstructive plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures...
Still, Republicans are not the only ones protesting the CLASS Act on the grounds that it won't work financially. In October, seven Democrats wrote to Senate majority leader Harry Reid urging him to exclude the CLASS Act - already included in the passed House health reform bill - from the Senate's legislation, saying they had "grave concerns that [the CLASS Act would] create a new federal entitlement program with large, long-term spending increases that far exceed revenues." The chief actuary for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wrote that the CLASS Act provisions in the House bill...
These are damning statements, but here again, the devil is in the details. The CLASS Act in Reid's Senate bill is considerably stronger in fiscal terms, according to the American Academy of Actuaries (AAA), than the much criticized act as outlined in the House and HELP committee bills. "There have been quite a few changes in the right direction," says Steven Schoonveld, an actuary who wrote the original critical AAA report on the CLASS Act in the HELP bill...
...Even more damaging in the view of many reformers is a little-noticed deal that Senate majority leader Harry Reid cut to get the support he needed to bring the bill to the floor of his chamber. The original Finance Committee bill would have triggered the commission's recommendations whenever the rate of increase in Medicare spending outpaced overall economic growth - something that happens almost every year. But the current version would allow it to make recommendations only when Medicare spending per capita grows faster than overall health costs. That almost never occurs. The change in economic measuring sounds technical...
...Several sources say Reid made the change in part at the pleading of former Congresswoman Barbara Kennelly, who runs the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, a powerful senior-citizens advocacy group. "We don't think there ought to be a commission at all - period," says Maria Freese, the organization's director of government relations. "This is not supposed to be a bill that shrinks Medicare." Administration officials are working to get the teeth restored to the commission idea - "We've got to have it," says an official - but that will be a huge challenge. The White House will...